Black ink dotwork drawing of an observatory dome among pine trees beneath a starry sky, set in a diamond shape on white paper beside two fineliner pens.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Observatory under a dotwork night sky

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A diamond-shaped drawing shows a domed observatory set among pine trees, with a winding path below. The night sky above is built from dense stippled dots, with small star marks near the top point. The image is black ink on white paper, with no colour apart from the grey pens and skin at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Star Night sky Pine tree Path

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You'll want the flask, and mind the step, it's been loose since the winter the dome lost its shutter to a gale. Sit where I can see your face. There, that's right. Now, the Ashdown Travelling Fair came through the valley every August for forty years, and the year I was sixteen my father took the job of keeping the little telescope on the hill above the fairground, charging a penny a look to farmers' children who wanted to see the rings of Saturn and got a smudge of the moon instead.

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He never trusted the sky. He trusted the dots. Every night he'd sit at the table with a pot of black ink and a set of those fine pens, stippling the sky onto card, a thousand tiny points at a time, so the dark would have something to hold. The fair folk thought him mad. The strongman's wife bought one of his cards for a shilling and pinned it over her bed, and the next season she came back to say she'd dreamt of pine trees growing up the side of a mountain.

The night the fair packed up for good, I climbed the path to the dome alone. The brass was cold and the shutter was open, and there, through the eyepiece, was nothing but my own reflection and a single star that had not been there the night before, or so my father swore when I told him. He only smiled and said some things are too small to be drawn until they've decided to stay.